


the day is fading on white houses

by firingmaincannon (dasheroyjackson)



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Angst, Gen, Homesickness, i miss home and so does epsilon, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 18:19:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4715900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dasheroyjackson/pseuds/firingmaincannon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A very short story about homesickness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the day is fading on white houses

Epsilon gets quiet sometimes.

It’s always noticeable, because he’s usually so fond of his own voice. But, sometimes even in the middle of sentences, he’ll trail off into slow words, then silence. 

Carolina can sense when the quiet is coming, mostly, but her neural connection to him doesn’t tell her why it happens. After a few weeks of it, though, she’s learned from observation what triggers it.

Talking about the sim troopers usually does it.

Or traveling through deserts, or canyons.

Once she wakes up in her makeshift encampment sweating, the sleeping bag half-unzipped and thrown off in the night, yet she still has a niggling sense that she is far colder than she should be. She tastes sand. She knows the memory isn’t hers. When she crawls out of the tent into the forest, the smell of pine is suffocating. She’d always liked that smell. Epsilon doesn’t.

She never calls him Church because it makes him so conflicted. The discontentment weighs heavy in her own chest.

He is happy to be with her, she can tell even if he’d die before saying it himself. She is kin in so many ways, ways they don’t think any other person would understand, that they both know they cannot express. So they show it in small ways. She likes that he calls her Sister. He doesn’t know she hears it, but the name and the feeling suffuses all his thoughts about her. She never had a sibling and it is the closest thing to real family either of them has had. He is old and a little degraded, and she is tired and guilty, but they complete each other. 

But there are so many parts of him, more than she can keep track of, more than he can keep under control. And some of those parts remember different pasts. A lost wife. Psychological torment. And, in stark contrast, a long time full of nothing but arguments and staring aimlessly through a rifle scope, bleary and slow but content. He has coped with the grief of the first and the trauma of the second. The third he cannot yet move past. It is easier in some ways to heal from hurt than it is to forget joy.

She wakes some mornings with words stuck in her mouth. Every time she forgets them like a dream, but is left with their taste, yearning and bleak on her tongue. He never says them himself. It hurts him less, she thinks, to speak his sadness through different lips. She doesn’t mind, really, that he uses her mind to process his own emotions. She can’t bring herself to confront him. 

Instead, when he falls into silence, she learns to get to a place where she can see the sky, lay down, gaze toward the blazing sun, and remember for him the hottest, driest, most miserable rock pit she has never seen.

He still won’t talk for a while, but in the cool shadows of her mind she can feel him smile.


End file.
